A week in review, 2018-W48

Wrote

Read

Mark Singer, Ricky Jay's Magical Secrets, The New Yorker (1993-04-05). (notes) At McCabe’s, he was doing improvisational patter. He had his stuff down so well he was just free. He had the guts to bring people onstage and really play with them, instead of having to be so careful that they might see something that would cause him to blow what he was trying to do. He was very casual, but his language had a Shakespearean feel. He was brutal with hecklers—not because it would throw him off. He just didn’t like hecklers. He vaporized them.

Kate Bernot, Why hundreds of breweries all plan to make the exact same IPA, The Takeout (2018-11-21). To further raise funds for fire relief, Sierra Nevada has created an IPA called Resilience IPA, with 100 percent of sales going to the Camp Fire fund. The brewery’s founder, Ken Grossman, then called on every brewery in America to brew the same beer, providing the recipe for Resilience so others could replicate it and donate further proceeds to the fund.

Keith Rollag, Salvatore Parise and Rob Cross, Getting New Hires Up to Speed Quickly, Sloan Management Review (Winter 2005). (notes) Newcomers represent one of a company's most important and underutilized assets—a source of fresh ideas, perspectives, expertise and industry contacts that an organization can leverage to become more innovative and competitive. [...] The challenge is to capture the fresh ideas and insights from newcomers before they either become socialized into old ways of thinking or simply give up trying to change the system.

Russ Parsons, Julie, Julia and me: Now it can be told, The Los Angeles Times (2009-08-12). So that solves part of the mystery of Julia's dis: professional pride. This won't come as a surprise to anyone who knew her well. One of the marvelous things about Julia Child was that even with all of the honors she had earned, she still approached her work with the earnestness (and competitiveness) of a beginner.

Listened

657: How Your Identity Changes When You Change Jobs, HBR IdeaCast (2018-11-20). (notes) The only way we learn is by doing something different, see what happens, and whether that's something useful or not. And so the process of learning requires doing some different things. What's fun about the idea of playfulness is it's not play in the literal sense of the word, but playfulness in the sense of giving yourself license not to be consistent, and giving yourself the freedom to just try things out without necessarily having a very specific purpose. It replaces the logic of efficiency with the logic of exploration.